Fraenkel Gallery’s 2026 exhibition by Christian Marclay features new monoprints and collages informed by Marclay’s enduring interest in vinyl records, and a 2015 video activating a work by Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth, held in a Fluxus archive in Germany. In an interview, Marclay talks with Jeffrey Fraenkel about his longstanding engagement with Fluxus art, and how his approach to working with records has changed over time.
JF: Christian, I’m curious about how you were first introduced to Fluxus art. How has it shaped your development and your interest in performance art?
CM: I discovered Fluxus through John Armleder when I was a student in Geneva in the 1970s. John had this small gallery and bookshop where he showed work by Fluxus artists, and he was doing performances with his group Ecart.
Another turning point was seeing the Beuys exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1979. Around the same time, I was attracted to a strange mix of Fluxus, punk rock, and performance art. Beuys, Vito Acconci, and Laurie Anderson were influences, and I was also going out to see bands like DNA, Mars, and Sid Vicious.
All of that came together and pushed me to start my own band, The Bachelors, Even, and I began using vinyl records in my performances.
More recently I’ve even gone back and re-enacted some Fluxus pieces with John Armleder, which has felt like coming full circle.
JF: What drew you to this particular artwork in the Sohm Archive? Do you see this work and pieces like Shake Rattle and Roll (Fluxmix), 2004, as continuing a Fluxus approach, or is there something in your activations that pushes against the ideas these pieces originally embodied?
CM: The irony is that Fluxus tried so hard to be anti-commercial, yet now all these Fluxus objects, boxes, and cheap bits of ephemera have become valuable collectibles. Things that were originally meant to be handled are now untouchable, displayed behind glass.
That’s really where the impulse for Fluxmix and Bildspiel came from, I wanted to bring those objects back to life. In Fluxmix, a lot of the inexpensive editions weren’t designed to be used sonically, but I found ways to make sounds with them. The Dieter Roth piece was obviously meant to make sound, to be interacted with. When I found it gathering dust in storage at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, my first instinct was, “I need to hear this thing.” So I put together a proposal, got permission, and started playing with it. It’s basically like a giant record, and I guess my deejaying instincts just kicked in.
JF: Over the last decades, the role of vinyl records has shifted in our culture, from something ubiquitous to an increasingly obsolete technology, and now to a more specialized, niche medium. Has that transformation affected how you think about your work with records?
CM: Surprisingly, vinyl isn’t dead at all. More records are being sold today than ever before. Kids are rediscovering this analog medium and finding it far more appealing than immaterial streaming. I’ve stopped deejaying myself, but I still love listening to records. The covers alone are an endless source of inspiration.
Because of this new series of works, I’ve found myself back in used record shops, rediscovering the pleasure of physically thumbing through the bins instead of scrolling through Ebay. It feels like coming back to an old addiction.
JF: In the collage series Oculi, you use the circular opening in record sleeves to frame images on LP covers, providing a glimpse of the full photographic artwork. Do you see a tension in these works between a kind of affection for the materiality of the objects, and a critique of them as music industry products, packaging and selling something ineffable?
CM: For the Oculi series, I started focusing on how photography is used on record covers. Plenty of well-known photographers have created cover art—Robert Mapplethorpe, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, etc., but just as many records were illustrated by completely anonymous photographers. I’m not really interested in who took the photo anyway.
Using the hole in the sleeve, I only reveal a tiny fragment of the cover; I hide much more than I show. When I buy a record, the cover is my first clue about what the music might be, but there’s always a mystery until you drop the needle into the groove. I’ve been curious for a long time about that relationship between an image and a sound.
